In my talk, How Much Will this Project Cost? at Agile 2012 last week, I got to say, “Short is beautiful.” For those of you who have never seen me, I’m five feet tall. The question was something like this: For programs, don’t you want longer iterations, so people don’t have the overhead of planning, […]
I’ve been having some email conversations with some project and program managers turned Scrum Masters. In general here’s how things have proceeded: Their organizations decided agile was a great idea Their organizations decided Scrum was a great idea to implement agile (because they don’t know the difference between Scrum and agile) The teams started working
Imagine this scenario: you want to transition to agile, and you have a geographically dispersed team with people all over the world. You have two developers in the UK and two in Boston, two testers in Portland, Oregon, a product manager in Brazil, and you, the project manager are in Sweden. And, you are pretty
I’m offering a public workshop about Transitioning to Agile in Stockholm, May 28-29, 2012, in English. Developers’ lives change when you transition to agile. Product owners’ lives change. Managers lives’ change. The organization’s culture changes. And, when a project and an organization transitions to agile, the testers and test managers lives’ change, too. Through our
A reader asked why the lifecycle in Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams, Part 1 is not Scrum. It’s not Scrum for these reasons: The project manager and product owner start the release planning and ask the team if the release planning is ok. The team does not generate the initial draft of release planning
I have an article posted at Techwell, Management Myth #1: The Myth of 100% Utilization. This myth has always been a problem. It’s even more of a problem now as more organizations transition to agile. People need time to think. They need time to adapt to their current circumstances. They need time to create their
If you missed my most recent Pragmatic Manager newsletter, Focus on One Thing at a Time, it’s posted. In it, I ranted about the delays of multitasking and introduced a new service: Peer Project Portfolio Coaching. I keep seeing people trying to make the transition to agile, still multitasking and not able to say No
I’ve been working with folks making their transition to agile. One of the hardest transitions is for the managers and technical leaders. Managers are accustomed to working in timeboxes. To them, the iteration is a timebox. But, they also are accustomed to features spanning multiple timeboxes, and that’s not OK in agile. They are accustomed
I’ve been working with several management teams who want me to train them or their project managers to take over the agile training. It’s not unreasonable from their perspective—it’s how they’ve transitioned to all the other process improvement approaches over the years. Except, none of the other process improvement approaches have been built on the
I hope that this 3-part series on how to move to continuous integration and how to evaluate if it’s worth moving to continuous integration on your program convinced you moving to continuous integration was worth it for programs. The reason continuous integration is an issue on programs, is because the lack of CI can delay